fred79 said:

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something i mentioned before

protip: people who extract anything out of the earth have never played "Jenga". dumbasses.

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fred79 said:

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i just thought the video on this webpage belonged here. this is the kind of stupidity that humanity should be standing up to, and eradicating by any means necessary.


on a side note, i love the jon stewart show.

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Wasps don't exactly win popularity contests. So why is the federal government releasing millions of wasps into 24 states — on purpose?

First of all, these aren't what you think of when you think of wasps. They're tiny, they aren't yellow, and they don't sting humans.

These wasps are actually on our side: a bug army deployed in a desperate attempt to save our dying trees.

The US Department of Agriculture hopes these special wasps will be a key ally in the fight against emerald ash borers, invasive beetles whose larvae have destroyed trees across vast swaths of northern and eastern America in just a few decades.

Scientists don't want to douse half the country in pesticides, so they're trying a craftier approach by enlisting the emerald ash borers' natural enemies. This isn't the first time the government has tried this clever strategy, but the effort has never reached across so many states at once.

The USDA found four types of wasps to try against the emerald ash borers. They all lay their eggs inside borer eggs or larvae, killing them before they turn into wood-munching beetles. Government scientists spent some time figuring out how to make these wasps happy before their deployment and made sure the wasps wouldn't go after anything besides emerald ash borers.

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Once released, the wasps will track down emerald ash borers by sniffing at ash trees; they can actually smell the difference between healthy trees and infected ones. Each wasp will zero in on a target by feeling out the vibrations the beetle larva causes as it roots through the tree. Then, the wasp lays its eggs on the baby emerald ash borer. When the wasp eggs hatch, the baby wasps will feed off the emerald ash borer, killing it.

While the wasps can't save trees that are already damaged, they can — scientists hope — reduce emerald ash borer populations enough to protect trees that are currently healthy.

emerald ash borer larva © Provided by Business Insider emerald ash borer larva U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS)/FlickrWhy make such a fuss about some bugs? It turns out that the 8 billion commercial timber trees those pesky beetles want to destroy are worth about $280 billion, all told. Replacing all the ash trees we've planted in cities and towns would be another $25 billion.

The wasps won't be fighting emerald ash borers alone. Woodpeckers, which enjoy a nice snack of borer larvae are another key ally.

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Air pollution from China, India and several other Asian countries has wafted across the Pacific Ocean over the past 25 years, increasing levels of smog in the western U.S., a study finds.

Smog, also known as ground-level ozone, is harmful to human health, because it can exacerbate asthma attacks and cause difficulty breathing. It also harms sensitive trees and crops. It's different than the "good" ozone up in the stratosphere, which protects life on Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

Scientists measured ozone levels recorded at springtime for the past 25 years in 16 national parks in the western U.S., including Yellowstone, Yosemite and Grand Canyon. The parks' locations farther away from cities, where smog is typically expected, made them ideal spots for the study.

The team looked at levels in the spring when wind and weather patterns push Asian pollution across the Pacific Ocean, said Meiyun Lin, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who led the study. In the summer, when those weather patterns subside, ozone levels in the national parks remained well above normal.

Asian air pollution was, by far, the biggest contributor to smog in the West, the researchers found. The team also looked at other factors, such as wildfires and methane from livestock. Asian air pollution contributed as much as 65% of the western U.S. ozone increase, while wildfire emissions supplied less than 10% and methane about 15%.

Since 1992, Asia has tripled its emissions of smog-forming chemicals such as nitrogen oxides. Though China and India are the worst offenders, North and South Korea and Japan also contribute, said Lin, who is also a research scholar at Princeton University.

The smog levels in the western U.S. have increased each year despite a 50% reduction in U.S. emissions of smog-forming pollutants.

"Twenty years ago, scientists first speculated that rising Asian emissions would one day offset some of the United States' domestic ozone reductions," said Owen Cooper, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado and NOAA, who was not directly involved in the study. Now that prediction has come true, he said.

Asian pollution only slightly contributes to smog in the eastern U.S., the study found. Levels there typically spike during intense summer heat waves.

The study was published Wednesday in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

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fred79 said:

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it's science; don't even try to debate me.

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blizzardboy said:

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http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/13/germany-is-a-coal-burning-gas-guzzling-climate-change-hypocrite/

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he latest round of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which runs from Nov. 6 to 17, is loaded with symbolism. The conference is being chaired by island nation of Fiji, which is severely affected by rising seas and desertification caused by climate change. The location of the meeting in Bonn, Germany, meanwhile, was intended to underscore the cooperation between those responsible for global warming and those in the path of its destruction. Of all the cities of the industrial world, Bonn was selected not just because it is the seat of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, but also because it is in Germany, the industrial giant that has an international reputation as a pioneer and righteous leader in climate protection.

Just this summer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel read U.S. President Donald Trump the riot act for pulling out of the Paris climate accord, chiding the United States for ignoring and perpetuating climate change. For years, Germany’s Energiewende, or renewable energy transition, was held up as a best practice for other nations to follow. After all, in just 15 years Europe’s biggest economy turned a third of its electricity generation green by subsidizing investments in solar energy and wind power. In doing so, it added 300,000 jobs to the economy. Even while it was in the process of phasing out nuclear power, Germany managed the transition while its factories hummed along, the economy posting record growth and trade surpluses. In the late aughts, Merkel was dubbed “the climate chancellor” for her engagement on behalf of the climate.

Yet Germany’s image as selfless defender of the climate, which was once largely deserved, is now a transparent fiction. Germany has fallen badly behind on its pledges to sink its own greenhouse gas pollutants. In fact, Germany’s carbon emissions haven’t declined for nearly a decade and the German Environment Agency calculated that Germany emitted 906 million tons of CO2 in 2016 — the highest in Europe — compared to 902 million in 2015. And 2017’s interim numbers suggest emissions are going to tick up again this year.

Germany is now in serious danger of hitting neither its 2020 nor its 2030 emissions targets, the very benchmarks that it browbeat other nations into adopting at previous climate conferences.
Germany is now in serious danger of hitting neither its 2020 nor its 2030 emissions targets, the very benchmarks that it browbeat other nations into adopting at previous climate conferences.
Leading German think tanks agree that Germany can’t, at its current rate, slash emissions enough in the next two years to reduce its carbon output by 40 percent (compared to its 1990 levels) or 55 percent by 2030. The Berlin-based think tank Agora Energiewende calculates that Germany has thus far brought its emissions down by only about 30 percent since 1990, much of the reduction coming after unification, when eastern Germany’s industrial economy collapsed. “Only 30 percent instead of 40 percent less CO2 is not a little off the mark, but rather this would constitute a blatant failure,” said Patrick Graichen, director of Agora Energiewende, referring to the 2020 target. “Failure to reach the 2020 climate change goals impacts not only the climate, but also Germany’s international role, which all governments since [the 1982 to 1998 chancellor] Helmut Kohl have worked toward for years.”

If Germany falls short in 2020, experts say, then the much more ambitious 2030 reductions will almost surely be out of reach, to say nothing of Berlin’s stated goal of cutting emissions by 95 percent by 2050.

Germany’s hypocrisy is ultimately a failure of its political leadership. Merkel’s recent term in office, explained R. Andreas Kraemer of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, was a triumph, he said, for the fossil fuel lobby. Most egregiously, he said, Germany slapped a tax on self-generated solar power that is used in private homes and offices. “The rate of installation of wind and solar power was slowed by government fiat and in violation of market forces,” Kraemer said.

But the biggest problems are ones that German politicians have allowed to linger for years, if not decades: Germany’s prodigious coal production for coal-fired power plants, on the one hand, and its sheltered automobile industry on the other.

Germany is Europe’s largest producer and burner of coal, which accounted for 40.3 percent of net power production in 2017: 15.5 percent from hard coal and 24.8 percent from lignite, also known as brown coal, among the dirtiest of fossil fuels, which Germany mines more of than any other country in the world. Germany’s electricity sector itself is responsible for more than a third of the country’s CO2 emissions. Even more damning: Germany is still digging new open-cast mine pits — as well as subsidizing the industry as a whole, although it has promised to phase out coal in the indefinite future (hard coal use will end in 2018). Among Europe’s power plants, Germany’s brown coal stations constitute six out of 10 of the worst polluters. The lignite power plants, which run 24/7 year-in, year-out, produce so much power that German utilities sell the surplus abroad.

The reason behind Germany’s commitment to coal is not primarily, as the coal lobby claims, to shoulder the burden left by the nuclear reactors coming offline, or to provide backup for the renewables at times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Experts say that all of the country’s coal plants could be shut down by 2030 — and German industry wouldn’t feel the pinch. But rather it’s all about the lignite-mining jobs (about 20,000 in total) in the economically hard-hit regions of western Rhineland and eastern Lusatia, which are Social Democratic Party of Germany strongholds, and the powerful clout of the mining and energy lobbies, not least Germany’s third-biggest union: IG Bergbau, Chemie, Energie.

This is why only one political party — the Greens — addressed Germany’s coal industry and climate change in the recent election campaign. It said that the 20 dirtiest coal plants could be shuttered at once. None of the other parties even had climate protection among their top 10 priorities. The Social Democratic candidate Martin Schulz barely mentioned it on the campaign trail. There are voices in the Social Democratic Party, the Left, and the liberal Free Democratic Party that are for calling off the 2020 target of a 40 percent CO2 reduction in order to protect the coal industry.

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